Earlier patents which discuss the general problems of gathering and selectively storing and converting data include the following:
______________________________________ 4,273,440 Froessl June 16, 1981 4,553,261 Froessl May 31, 1983 4,726,065 Froessl February 16, 1988. ______________________________________
There are several related problems in the gathering and storage of data to form a data bank from which data can be efficiently retrieved, the significance and nature of these problems varying to some extent with the nature of the input documents and the purpose or purposes for forming the data bank. It will be assumed herein that all of the data to be put into the data bank originates with existing documents, i.e., little or no data is to be created by keying in at the system of the invention. While keying in and creation of data using the system is certainly possible, that is not the purpose for which it has been created.
Since all of the data to be entered is already in a typed or printed "hard copy" form, although possibly with illustrations or hand-written notes, a major objective of any such system is to avoid retyping or rekeying this data, to the extent possible, into the data bank. Thus, optical scanning equipment is to be used, allowing the documents to be fed into the scanning equipment wherein it is converted into electrical digital signals which can be stored as image signals and from which an image can be created on a conventional video, LCD or other display, essentially reproducing a "picture" of the original document. The stored digitized image signals, wherever applicable, can also be converted by character recognition software into a machine language form such as ASCII or other code. In accordance with the earlier patents, this can be done selectively so that desired portions of the documents are in machine-readable form for export to word processing programs or the like and to be available for machine searching.
One problem with prior systems is that they had to be constructed for use with specific scanner hardware and character recognition software so that the controlling software could implement the selection and delivery of portions of the image for conversion. Thus, even if a potential buyer of such a system had a scanner and conversion software, it would be necessary for him or her to purchase the scanning and recognition equipment for which the system was designed.
Another problem with prior systems is that the scanning, conversion and editing were necessarily done in a "serial" or sequential fashion. Such systems used a personal computer (PC) as the heart of the system, the PC microprocessor being the primary data processing tool. Thus the microprocessor was occupied by, first, control of the scanner, then by conversion, if any was being accomplished, and then by editing of the text to make manual corrections or additions. A person doing the editing was thus faced with the need to await completion of the other tasks. It should be mentioned also that the expression "PC" is used herein in the broader sense of meaning any personal computer, not only those which are compatible with machines produced by International Business Machines, Inc.